Jamie Baldridge

Jamie Baldridge (b. 1975) was raised in a small-town Catholic environment in Louisiana. He recalls deciding to become an artist as a child, after discovering a copy of 101 Fairy Tales in his grandmother’s attic—a moment that sparked a lifelong fascination with myth, fable, and the surreal. He first studied theology and creative writing before earning his BFA in 2001 and MFA in 2005 in photography from Louisiana State University.

Working with large-format, medium-format, and high-resolution digital cameras, Baldridge constructs surreal, digitally manipulated tableaux that reinterpret classic tales and archetypal stories. His photographs often feature female protagonists staged within aged, timeworn interiors, creating visual puzzles that evoke metaphor, narrative tension, and existential curiosity. His practice blends photographic craftsmanship with digital manipulation to create highly constructed, enigmatic scenes that question the structure of reality and the symbolic language of stories.

Baldridge has exhibited widely across the United States, Spain, and the Netherlands. His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Rare Books Collection of the Library of Congress, Cornell University, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and the University of Notre Dame. He is currently a professor of photography at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he continues to live and work.